Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 13, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. When you are Ray Bradbury in 2001, and you have picked up nearly every award out there, in fact the year before you were given the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, then you are entitled to a full jacket of a Charles Addams painting. Addams died in 1988, but the painting had been commissioned in 1946 to accompany Bradbury’s second story published by Mademoiselle (thanks Truman Capote!). In From the Dust Returned (2001) Bradbury reconfigured and reshaped and remagicked stories from 1946 to 1999. The novel is a consideration of what happens when a world seems to be increasingly alienated and hostile to the dark figures of the imagination — the man-bats, the ghosts, the ghouls, the werewolves. What happens to us when we scare ourselves with ourselves — and not with things that go bump in the night? Bradbury saw a danger in that, a stress that was worse, inescapable, claustrophobic in its lack of imagination. On the other hand, this is what happens when you do have imagination: you welcome Anuba as the first arrival to the homecoming, because the Cat must be first. “And so Anuba, her fur a sooty fire, her whiskers like lightning sparks, with ocelot paws strolled into the House on that special night, ignoring the empty rooms and dreamless beds, to arrive at the main hearth in the great parlor. Even as she turned thrice to sit, a fire exploded int he cavernous fireplace. While upstairs, fires on a dozen hearths inflamed themselves as this queen of cats rested.”